Sentiment Analysis of COVID-19 Tweets using Neural Network in Pakistan

Abstract

Covid-19 is a respiratory infectious disease that spreads from person to person. World Health Organization declared it a pandemic in March 2020. Social distancing and lockdowns during the pandemic affected the lives, sentiments, and mental health of people. They are mentally, physically, and emotionally disturbed. It was observed that the verification of the very first Covid case increased the precariousness and fear in Pakistan because people had no information about the state policies. In this paper, Covid-related tweets from Pakistan for the year 2021 are collected. Pakistan faced two Covid waves in 2021. Dataset is preprocessed and a neural network-based model is applied to analyze the sentiment of the tweet. Sentiments of people are analyzed separately for each Covid wave, moreover, a comparative analysis is presented to discuss the change in people's sentiments with the passage of time. Results show a reduction in the number of tweets from third to fourth wave. Moreover, the %decrease in negative and positive sentiments are 6 and 1 respectively which show that by the passage of time, people started living with the environment and time healed the wounds of fears and uncertainty in their lives.